I quite enjoyed the first Vera Wong novel so I was excited to see there was a sequel coming out this month. And yet, I admit I was a little worried going into this novel. Jesse Q. Sutanto has another series that is slightly over the top but for that one, the second novel just took things so over the top, that the premise didn’t work for me and I stopped reading it. I’m happy to say that Vera Wong doesn’t go down that route. If you like the last Vera novel, you will like this one. If you didn’t, then this probably won’t do it for you, either.
After falling for a phone scam, Vera finds herself on a new case when she meets Millie at the police station, a young woman looking for her lost friend. Vera soon finds out more about the missing man, Thomas – or Xander according to his social media account – and it doesn’t take her long to find another assortment of lost people that are persons of interest in the case, all feeling guilty about how things played out between them and Xander. But are any of them the killer?
Intermixed are descriptions of delicious sounding mountains of food, check ins with Vera’s found family from the last novel (she mostly sets these into context though there was one character who I couldn’t quite remember from last novel or how they had fit in – not that it is relevant to enjoy or understand what is going on here).
The resolution to this one ends up going to a darker space than the last one, and Sutanto also briefly touches a bit on loneliness and perception in the days of social media but overall, it is a hopeful and heartwarming murder mystery